They definitely had a problem. Cinzy did not want to come right out and say it, because she had taken the job of morale officer upon her shoulders, but things were going to get real weird, and real bad, real fast if they didn’t remedy the mana saturation situation.

For now, best to pretend like they were okay, that there was every chance she was worried about something with no basis in reality, and they were going to be fine.

“We definitely have a problem,” Trent grumbled.

Cinzy stifled a whimper of terror. Afterwards she stifled an annoyed groan. She then stifled a sigh, and the urge to put her hands on her hips and begin loudly chastising everyone.

Drat laughed bitterly, which was a Drat specialty. “What, you mean that?”

He didn’t have to cock his thumb over his shoulder at the portal, but did. The portal itself stood some thirty feet tall, and was clearly sucking mana through it. Cinzy didn’t even have a high Affinity and she could clearly see the shimmer of magic bending to speed through the portal.

She swept her arm around. “No, you patch of dry rot, I mean this.”

The vista they’d emerged into was vast, sweeping, and totally unlike anything they’d ever come across before. A blanket of snow covered everything in sight. The boogie trees had been replaced by glowering pseudo-evergreens, like spruce but with a single needle-filled ring of forest green instead of a huge sphere of deciduous Kelly green. They sure looked like Christmas trees, but one of the needle rings had a grumpy face on it, in comparison to the vapid and cheerful boogie trees, as Fletcher called them.

“We have to go!” Tara called.

Cinzy knew a few things about the geography of the world, and one of those things was its fluidity. Drat was grinning at her.

“First of all, and you can cut that shirt out, we’re a long way from Fletcher. Clearly he’s our key to anti-magic medicine. If we want to stay human. And I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer to remain the sort of thing I started out. The other option is throwing ourselves at the HQ and begging their mercy in order to get some meds. No idea what they want to do to us, but I’d bet based on the interrogation we went through back on earth that they need questions answered. HQ is not friendly.”

Drat was still giving her a lopsided idiot face. It was honestly a little off-putting, since he never smiled, and only joked when things were dangerously off kilter.

“For that matter, you chose to bring this newbie in here, meaning we have to protect her, and then somehow convince the Agency—“ Here she was forced to pause because one of the dour coniferous trees pulled up its spiny skirts and rushed by on legs that looked like roots, as much as a tree could rush, which was not fast. “We’ll need to convince the Agency we didn’t kidnap her. Oh, who am I kidding? We’re fugitives for life.” Drat was still smiling. “On top of that, we don’t have the assistance of any of our bond mates. We are transforming into Nakamamon, we’re wanted criminals, we have no idea where we are, and all the help we normally have is… we have a lot to worry about is all I’m saying,” Cinzy went on, “So why are you smiling? You are so weird.”

“More pressing matters!” Ivy called, while Drat just grinned at her.

“Shut up and just tell me,” she said, glowering.

She realized he was pointing directly up, and looked directly above her head just as the shadow of a literal mountain hovered overhead. She was looking at the flat surface with striations where the rock had sheared off, floated up, and was now hovering toward them.

“Fudge buckets,” she said.

Ten minutes later the shadow still covered Cinzy, and she was still running at absolute top speed. They were all running now, with Tara’s fast travel aura helping them to cover far more distance than she’d ever covered on foot on earth. This was at least a month’s worth of foot travel for her.

“It’s… coming… down!” Isabelle called.

She handed Helen back to Ivy, the new girl even now yelling her head off.

“Could you…” Drat asked, “shut her up?”

“She’s… your… problem,” she wheezed. “Wait. Why… are… we running?” They had a stone Sorcerer. Stone was the only thing he did. He did it so, so well.

It was because, Trent explained on the run, that he couldn’t move dozens or hundreds of tons of stone up off them at once. It would be like lifting an entire column of mountain, hundreds of feet thick, up off them. Not at all like keeping a giant’s foot from squashing them. Also he had basically no mana remaining. His mana pool was enormous, but had been exhausted for weeks.

“It’s coming down!” Trent announced, and Cinzy trusted him. He knew stone like she knew Taylor Swift’s discography. “Go go go go go!”

They went with all they had. They’d spent all their Tokens in the escape and they were lucky Tara had one to activate her aura.

Cinzy had never been crushed to death before, and didn’t want to start off her new life as a fugitive from her job as a pancake. She felt a stitch grab her in the side and demand she stop moving, but she didn’t. Not even when the mountain’s underside looked close enough that she could jump up and touch it.

Up ahead, the edge of the mountain, and more importantly, the sun on the snow-covered plain, came tantalizingly close. Lungs burning, side protesting, muscles aching, she wanted nothing more than for Trent to blast apart the stone above them so she could just take the tiniest of little breaks.

But nobody else did that. Pouting and miserable, she gave in to peer pressure and the desire to not die.

The moment though that Ivy and Isabelle and Tara stopped, Cinzy slumped to the ground and rolled. Behind them, about four feet back there, the mountain came to a rest by kicking up a gigantic amount of air and dust. The sound was like nothing she’d ever heard in her life.

They lay there for entirely too long, gasping for breath and staring at the sky.

“Is… there… another… one?” she asked. “Because… I’ll just… die. Just… leave me.”

Drat began laughing, another sound she’d never heard in her life. Or if she had, it had been eclipsed by his wry remarks, dry sense of humor, his unsmiling face. Drat’s laughter was loud and raucous. It went on long enough that Cinzy had to check to see if something else was coming to kill them. She couldn’t move anything but her head, but in raising it, she only found Tara and Ivy’s heads also raised, also staring at Drat. He continued to laugh, and laugh… and laugh some more.

Cinzy let her head fall back and she too started laughing. Soon Tara joined in, Isabelle too, and finally Ivy.

“What?” Helen demanded. The new girl’s failure to know Drat’s weird sense of humor only served to make Cinzy laugh more. The other three girls laughed right along.

There might be a second portal to earth, and it might be stuck open, but it had either been crushed by a mountain, or it was stuck beneath the mountain.

***

“That plan is terrible and you know it,” Drat said. Helen was holding his hand, and he seemed to dislike that a great deal. Drat’s discomfort struck Cinzy as just perfect.

“It’s the plan we have,” she said. “And it’s not bad, you’re just upset you didn’t come up with it.”

“It won’t work,” he said.

“It will and you know it,” Ivy said. “Now shut up and stay here.”

“I don’t want to go back in a prison cell,” he grumped.

Cinzy clapped him on the shoulder and used her ability to convince him yet again. He scowled at her.

“I know what you’re doing and I hate you.”

“You do not.” She turned to Helen. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Helen. I hope we’ll be in touch.”

Trent didn’t look like he enjoyed this plan either, but he shrugged and started digging. Unless the Agency had another stone Sorcerer or a series of improbably great spells by some extremely high level Wizards, they weren’t going to be able to use the portal.

Trent, being the least guilty out of the lot of them—barring Helen, who didn’t count—had the best chance of being invited back into the Agency after this breakout debacle. If Cinzy wasn’t in attendance and the Agency didn’t think they were being manipulated, he could probably convince them that Cinzy had concinced him with Likability or Tokens to go along with their plan.

Drat, being the other member of the team who hadn’t obviously done anything illegal, had a chance as well to evade serious consequences. They’d coached Helen in the correct version of the story: Cinzy had sweet-talked him into giving away his Tokens, and helping them to escape. She had definitely sweet-talked Helen, and displayed an unbelievable amount of charisma in helping the daring escape happen. It was an easy sell as far as Cinzy was concerned.

Drat’s flat look told her what he really thought of the plan. They were just leaving the two guys behind and all four girls were going to rejoin Fletcher for a resumption of their sexy time activities.

Which was definitely, undeniably part of what was happening.

The three of them gathered around Tara. Of the four of them, she was the most likely to have a chance of knowing where they were and where they were going.

Tara took a deep breath, with one hand always stuck to the area just above her mound. Cinzy wouldn’t dream of trying to understand the appeal of pregnancy, childbirth or motherhood, but she didn’t bring up the topic. She didn’t particularly want to know.

The Ranger abruptly reversed course and headed up the newly-landed mountain.

“Great,” Cinzy muttered. “The mountain again. Wonderful.”

“I’ll be right back,” the fellow blonde told her. “Just stick around down here.”

It turned out Tara didn’t need to climb the entire mountain, thank fudge. She could see a heck of a lot from a few hundred feet up. She also moved with an ease Cinzy wouldn’t have been able to manage even if she had on hiking boots and those walking poles. As soon as she went up, sniffed the air, and put a hand up, she nodded and headed back down.

They were going to be heading northeast, which stood to reason. If Alaska and Hawaii corresponded in any way to the geography of this world, that would’ve been her choice as well.

“I saw the HQ already in motion,” Tara told them.

“The whole castle?” Ivy asked, already shaking her head like she accepted it as fact. Floating antigravity castle also transported hundreds or thousands of miles? Sure, yeah, whatever.

“You need to stay off the ley line,” Trent told them. “You’ll absorb a lot more magic that way.”

“We’ll be okay,” Tara said, and got an odd look in return.

Soon they set off, and and it ended up being at a brisk jog. And that brisk jog just… went on, and then on. They jogged over hill and dale, across meadows and through copses of those sullen looking Christmas trees. It would be hours before they stopped to take a rest, but by then Cinzy would have long since figured out that Tara had a fast movement aura. Not only that, but that aura seemed to have the bonus of extending her Durability, which was pretty dang low.

They headed across rocky terrain that was at odd angles, spooking creatures like manta rays but made of stone. Cinzy wondered what they’d have done if Tara hadn’t steered them wide of those big stone pancakes. Get eaten?

She shuddered. Her powers were so monumentally useless when it came to all the wild Nakamamon. The sentient ones were so much clay for her to mold. She was even getting better with larger crowd sizes. Even though she hated playing her flute, it made swaying crowds easier.

But against these things she was utterly and totally out of her element. Just as Tara couldn’t use any of her abilities in town or to influence any of the sapient creatures.

There were times during their little adventures when Cinzy had occasion to respect Fletcher, and this was one of them. Putting together a balanced party wasn’t enormously amazing, but he’d convinced the admin to let him choose his people. It was a simple thing, she learned from hanging out with the RPG dorks, but Fletcher had pushed for it and she had to commend him for it.

Ugh, Fletcher. Her guts ached to have him. Regina must be in absolute heaven right now, getting to fork Fletcher every day and night while he researched the way to heal up his mother. And probably Fairy Poppins too, which twisted the knife further. Just thinking about him shrinking down and fracking Poppy’s guts out made Cinzy flush with jealousy and gush with arousal. She couldn’t wait to have him making her quiver with need and orgasm her brains out.

It was almost like her body knew he was almost within reach.

Her ass clenched at the thought of him slowly forcing his way into it, and she nearly turned an ankle on these fracking gigantic cockeyed rocks.

“Step lively,” Tara called back. “We’ll all have turns with Fletcher, but only if we don’t crack our skulls on rocks or get eaten by Geodiles.”

How had Tara put together—

It was then Cinzy realized Ivy and Tara were in much the same state she was. Isabelle too, to a lesser extent. All four of them could pass off their heavy breathing and blush of horniness off as exertion. Tara was kind of a genius for keeping them moving so long, so hard. They wouldn’t have to face the realization that all of them desperately wanted his lips on them, his arms around them, and his cock up in them.

She swore under her breath and told herself to get a hold of herself. She was acting like a complete sludge.

On the third day, the HQ castle came into view, so Tara had them veer wide. Although they knew a lot of people in the HQ, and some of those people might be able to give them some info on the possible location of Fletcher, they also knew they were wanted, and sighting anyone was potentially counterproductive.

Tara and the Guardians rustled up food, with Tara taking point. Cinzy’s job was always to get camp set up: collect firewood, dig a screen so the fire wouldn’t be seen, start the fire, and arrange a lean-to if possible. She’d learned all this from Tara and the happy couple. Then, after eating, they’d turn in, exhausted. She would spend each night playing either big spoon or little, and pretending she couldn’t hear Ivy and Isabelle writhing around just a foot away.

Her whole body would cramp with need, listening to Izzy sigh, imagining Ivy nestled between her legs and lapping at her wet slit, or slipping some number of fingers up in there while paying close attention to her girlfriend’s pleasure bud. She definitely wouldn’t imagine them engaged in a sixty-nine, both plunging fingers into one another and licking what they weren’t fingering. She wouldn’t have to imagine it, because the light of two moons often gave her glimpses of the beast with two backs. She wouldn’t have to ignore Tara failing to be secretive as she played with herself when she was the big spoon, because she could feel the Ranger’s butt bumping up against her drooling mound.

She despaired to think of what they would look like when they finally found Fletcher, and descended on him like a pack of starved hounds. She also shuddered to think what they’d smell like. Thankfully on two of these days they’d gotten a bath in, but… without changes of clothing, there was just no way they were in any way presentable.

They ended up passing days like this. It wasn’t until the fifth day that they stopped and took stock of the abilities Fletcher had shared with them.

“You think we can make up the anti-magic meds by ourselves?”

This is Christopher helping to ensure they wouldn’t transform into Nakamamon.